Category: The Basics

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Simple and Easy Processes

In the last post I commented on Ron Popeil’s product development approach – to make the product easy to demonstrate drives making it easy to use, which creates more value for the customer.

Let’s take the same thinking back to your internal customers.

What if, rather than just writing a procedure, you had to go and demonstrate it to the people who had to follow it? What if you had to demonstrate it well enough that they saw the benefit of doing it that way, and could demonstrate it back to you to confirm that they understood it? If you broke down the work and organized it to be easy to demonstrate and teach, would it look any different? (Hmmm. TWI Job Instruction actually sounds a lot like this.) Would you still ask “Why didn’t they just follow the procedure?”

Look at the information displays and the controls on your equipment. Do they provide total transparency that things are working? Or do they abstract and obscure reality in some way? Can your internal customer be sure things are going as expected?

Do controls give clear feedback that they are being set correctly? Are sequences of operations readily apparent?

How many “blinking 12:00” situations do you have out there on your shop floor – things that have been put into place, but nobody uses because nobody can really figure it out?

Come back to the design of the product itself. Is the manufacturing and assembly process apparent, obvious, and as simple as you can make it? Would it be designed differently if you had to demonstrate how to fabricate and assemble it?

How about your administrative processes? I recall, many years ago, a “process documentation process” being taught. In the class they were using “baking cookies” as a demonstration example. Yet the instructors, who presumably were experts, actually struggled trying to show how this works. This “process” was far less clear than they had thought it was when they had simply thought through it. “It did not work on TV.”

Look at your computer programs and their user interfaces. What makes sense to a programmer rarely makes sense in actual use. Watch over someone’s shoulder for a while. Could you easily demonstrate this process to someone else?

Ron Popeil cooks real chickens and real ribs in the production of his infomercials. He does not use contrived or carefully limited demonstration examples. As you look at your examples and exercises, how well do they stand up to the real world application? Can you go out to the shop floor and demonstrate your “product” in actual use?

This post is full of questions, not answers. I don’t have the answers. Only you (can) know how well your processes are engineered.

Design your production system (for product or service) as carefully as you would design the product or service itself.

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Values Checklists

I am in the process of going through a lot of old files and filling up recycle bins. Most of this stuff was collected back in first half of the 1990’s when the world wide web was just gaining critical mass, and a half day on Alta Vista, or the brand new search engine, Google, turned up new stuff all of the time. It disappeared just as fast, so the rule was “if you want it, copy it.”

A lot of this material comes from the TQM community. But what struck me enough to sit down for a minute and write about is checklists that include values like “respect for people,” “openness and honesty” and “teamwork.”

This was an era when companies were creating “values statements” and publishing them.

Many of them followed by trying to measure compliance with those values, putting them in performance management reviews, etc.

Of course since the mid 1990’s we know better. . . don’t we?

Values are tricky things. Certainly if a company is sincerely trying to change its culture, the values are going to have to shift. The question I have is not whether this is true, but whether writing them down and trying to enforce them is an effective way to go about it.

Consider how a company with a long, entrenched culture of conflict avoidance is going to transition itself into one which truly respects people?

In a conflict avoidance culture, the people who are truly open and honest tend to ruffle feathers and find themselves in the “out” crowd, isolated in the eddies, and often are never told why.

The people who have flourished in that culture now are saying they want to change it.

Let’s assume that the handful of people at the top – whose behavior has likely been rewarded by promotion throughout their careers and possibly even molded the rest of the organization, can even see that they have not been respectful of people.

If they truly want to change the values of the organization, the only way I can see for this to happen is if they, personally, are totally open and honest that (1) What they have been doing is holding the company back, and is disrespectful of people; (2) They intend to change it starting today; and (3) Ask for help and support from others around them to make a personal change.

If these things don’e happen, then it really doesn’t matter what they put on the wall or say they want everyone else to do.

This is a tough one. It is what Peter Senge calls “personal mastery” and what Jim Collins talks about in “Level 5 Leadership.”

Honestly, I don’t think it is a hard prerequisite for a fair degree of success. I know a few companies who have done pretty will without ever addressing this issue.

But I also know they are hitting the limits of what they can accomplish. As I am someone who sees things in terms of their potential I just wanted to take a couple of minutes and toss this one out there for everyone to think about while we (in the USA at least) stuff ourselves with turkey.

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Are You Ready for the Upturn?

Many pundits out there think the economy has hit bottom. If the last couple of cycles are any indication, when things start picking up again, it is going to happen fast. As people scramble to retain or gain market share they are going to want more and want it now.

And, if the last couple of times are any indication, many businesses are going to be caught totally flat footed and struggling to increase their output. I would also imagine that the “never again” vows that they made as things were going down will, once again, go out the window.

So, short of building up a lot of inventory and/or investing in excess capacity, what can you do to be more prepared?

Continue to work toward the ideal of one-piece-flow.

This does a few things for you. If you do it right, you will progressively collapse the throughput time of your process. This will make you more responsive to changes and make you less vulnerable to forecast errors.

More importantly, though, is the understanding you gain as you do this work. You want to know the cycle time constraint of each and every process in the value chain. With that information, you can predict what will constrain you from reaching any given level of production, and start to work on those constraints. That does not mean you increase production, nor does it mean that you add capital equipment. It means you know exactly what you are capable of doing, and exactly what you must do to get to the next level. In other words, you have a plan that you can put into motion at any time.

Work to standardize and stabilize your processes.

This effort helps make your work more ready for people. Many operations today are running well below their capacity, and they have lost their performance edge. Problems are going unnoticed and unaddressed because they aren’t really affecting production right now. That will change, and change fast, in a ramp-up situation.

Worse, unstable and poorly understood processes translate to long, error-prone learning cycles for new people, or current people in doing different work.

Re-energize your daily kaizen and problem solving and start seeking out the things that are disrupting the work. That investment will not only develop your ability to respond quickly and robustly to growth, it will develop people’s skills as well.

Develop your people and organization.

This will help your people become more ready for the work.

Things may be slow today, but do you know who you would put into your next leadership positions as they open up? Have you developed those potential leaders? Have you thought through how you will organize and support the work as business expands?

The more preparation you can make now, the easier it will be when you get into a fast-moving dynamic growth period. You will already have a baseline plan, so you will only need to assess the situation, modify as appropriate, and carry it out. The more of this planning you can do now, the more thinking you will be able to put into execution.

Even people who are already in leadership positions can probably use skills development. There are a few easy things you can do that will pay great dividends in a fast-flux environment.

Look into the TWI programs. These address crucial skills that line leaders need to succeed. Ideally, people would demonstrate those skills before being put into leadership positions.

The side benefit is that these programs give people skills they can use today to make the workplace safer, more consistent, and more stable. In a growth situation, Job Instruction gives you a standard method to bring new people on board, or to flex people quickly into different work and get them up to speed.

Free up as much capacity as possible.

The bottom line results of kaizen are seen primarily in the form of additional capacity – you are able to produce more with the same resources. You might not need that additional capacity right now, but if you are living within your means today, you can put that additional capacity in your hip pocket. Then, the first round of sales growth can be met without any additional resources. The better you are at kaizen, the longer you can hold your resource levels the same while growing output. The only way to get better is to practice, and just like learning to play the piano, this means practice every day.

Understand your supply base.

How well do you know your suppliers? How quickly can they respond if your needs change dramatically? Do you know which supplier controls how quickly you can increase output? Do you know at what point that bottleneck shifts to a different supplier?

The other thing to consider here is the length of that supply chain. If you are bringing in things from overseas, there is one fundamental that many people try to wish away:

No matter how hard you try, you can’t change what is on the boat.

That might seem obvious in saying it, but it is amazing how many times that four or five week transportation time ends up negating any “cost savings” in lower prices.

I am not saying this is good or bad. I am saying to look beyond invoice and transportation prices and understand your enterprise value chain as a dynamic, moving thing with a response time to change. That response time becomes critical when things are changing. Know what that response time is, and manage to it. If you don’t like the answers, you have to alter the system somehow.

Bottom line: The time to get good is now.

When you are scrambling to meet demand, “there won’t be time” for kaizen, and there will be even less time to learn how to do it. The time to get good at it is now. Your alternative is growing your cost structure at least as fast as sales are growing. Experience has shown that your cost structure likely grows faster than sales, and additional earnings come only with non-linear growth – relying on volume to make up for ever thinner margins. That might look OK in the short-term, but it is a strategy of becoming ever less efficient.

The better prepared you are for the upside, the stronger you will be the the inevitable next cycle.

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Learn how to Learn

John Shook’s latest column on lean.org is titled “Was NUMMI a Success?” He adds some interesting thought to the mix of the ongoing post-mortem on GM and NUMMI.

John argues (successfully, I think) that Toyota’s objectives for NUMMI were to learn how to take their system outside of the safe cocoon of Toyota City in Japan; and that GM’s objectives, aside from getting an idle plant going again, were to learn how to make small cars profitibly, and learn Toyota’s system.

So both companies were in the game to learn.

But Toyota had a huge advantage.

And if there’s one thing Toyota knows how to do it is how to learn, especially where it’s important down at the operational levels of the company – a characteristic that is the embodiment of the learning organization. Toyota’s biggest strength is that it [had] learned how to learn, and it was that approach to learning that defined its approach to NUMMI from day one.

Just as strong as Toyota’s advantage here, was GM’s deficit. While they clearly learned about the system, and indeed implemented pieces of it in new plants, there is no objective evidence that GM ever really “got” that this is much more than an industrial engineering model.

It is a model about continuously challenging your understanding and beliefs.

We start teaching it deep down in the process, “Why did the machine stop?” but the intent is for this thinking to find its way to the very top and learn how to ask “Why are sales 12% under projection this month?”

Toyota has learned some hard lessons about what they did not understand in the last year. I only hope we will be able to say the same about our public gamble on GM’s learning.

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The Lean Manager: Part 2 – The Basics

Click image for Amazon.com listing

This is Part 2 of a multi-part review. Part 1 is here.

In my review of Kaizen Express back in May, I took LEI to task for two things – First, I didn’t feel Kaizen Express contributed anything really new to the body of knowledge. I would have been satisfied if it had more clearly explained what had been said before, but it didn’t do that either. Second, and more importantly, I felt that Kaizen Express, and the LEI in general, were propagating the conception that the tools were what defined “lean” and that “the tools” were “the basics.” I disagreed on both points, and still do.

I am now about halfway through The Lean Manager, and I believe this book is addressing those issues – and hopefully challenging some of the thinking within the publishers. In other words, in its content, this book is everything that Kaizen Express isn’t. Get it. Read it. Do what it says, and you will actually be implementing the basics.

What makes this different? Instead of revolving around technical descriptions of the tools, this book clearly shows the proper relationship between the tools and the two most important aspects of what makes the Toyota Production System work:

  • Leaders (and how they lead and what they lead – and it isn’t implementing the tools)
  • People (yes, other books pay lip service by mentioning shop floor engagement, but The Lean Manager is all about shop floor engagement)

The authors start to hammer home the point in Chapter 2, Everybody, Every Day. In one of the many lecturettes they use to convey the key points via their characters, Amy, a corporate consultant, sums it up:

“Everybody, everyday solving problems, that’s the only answer to the Pareto dilemma. You’ve got to visualize two flows in the plant. One: the product flow[. . .].  Two: the problem flow to the person who finally solves the problem. [. . .] you shouldn’t funnel all problems to your key technical people. You should protect them to work on the really difficult issues. What you have to organize is the problem solving in the line!”

And with that, the rest of the story follows – this fictitious plant manager under fire in this fictitious company sets out to do that.

The subsequent chapters (so far – remember, I haven’t finished the book yet) are Go and See, which hammers home the importance of the leaders – all of the leaders being present, not just to witness problems, but to ensure they are being solved by the right people, in the right way. Further, they must break down any barriers which impede that flow. And it’s not just the leaders. Ultimately, the entire shop floor is organized so that everyone is immersed in genchi genbutsu every time a task is carried out or work is performed. This becomes the check in PDCA.

Chapter 3 is titled Managing is Improving and begins the confront the psychological and organizational aspects of the changes that are now coming to a head in the story. This part requires the most creativity on the part of the authors, as it is an entirely human process. Because it is a human process, not a technical one, it is impossible to write a technical manual on how to do it. It requires knowledgeable, dedicated leadership that is humble enough to stake out a position that might be wrong, knowing that doing so improves the chance of learning something.

And that has been the issue in our industry. It is far, far easier to describe the tools in excruciating detail than it is to confront the leadership and organizational change issues. And because the technical descriptions predominate the literature (including, and especially what has come out of LEI for the last 10+ years), it is far easier to believe that “implementing the tools” is something that leaders can delegate to specialized technical staff.

This book, so far, is (rightly) turning that thinking on its ear.

Continued at Part 3.

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First: Define Value

A couple of days ago, in “The First Steps of The Lean Journey,” I said that there really is no first step, only the next step from where ever you are right now.

I admit that I left out a big assumption there – that you know where you are trying to go.

More specifically, that you really know the value you create.

Bas Mathijsen has posed the question here on The Whiteboard, as well as in a post in the LEI Forums where asks (paraphrasing) “Who defines customer value?” and “What is customer value?”

Good questions, and we don’t spend enough time there.
I have seen a lot of “improvement” effort dissipated because there was no clear idea of what the process was supposed to actually deliver.

As obvious as it seems, customer value is defined by no one but the customer. The transaction need not be monetary, or even commercial. A volunteer for a non-profit organization gives up time (and possibly money) and gets something in exchange. Usually that is some level of emotional satisfaction. A nonprofit that needs to attract volunteers needs to be conscious of this.

Since it is subjective, different customers are going to define “value” in different ways. Dan Sullivan once put it really well with this analogy (paraphrasing):

My neighbor has a really nice lawn. When he buys a lawnmower, he is interested in features like evenly cutting, ease of starting, how well it manages the clippings. But maybe I am looking for different things in a lawnmower. Maybe I hate mowing the lawn. I might be looking for a lawnmower that cuts the grass just below the roots.

Clearly these customers define “value” in different ways.

The other factor to keep in mind is that this isn’t a black-and-white thing. The value the customer finds in your product or service can be enhanced or diminished by an almost infinite matrix of circumstances. These include the magnitude of the (customer’s) problem you are solving, the degree of emotional satisfaction that is gained from your product or service, how easy (or aggravating) your sales and customer support processes are, the customer’s perception of your quality and a host of other intangibles. All of these translate into what (if anything!) the customer is willing to part with to get your product or service. Indeed, we have all heard of things that couldn’t be given away, or that had negative value.

The only real way to know what the customer truly values is to be the customer. This great little piece by Dan Markovitz on Evolving Excellence clearly shows how not to do it. Read the article, then do the opposite.

So, the customer defines what is valuable to him. What does the company do?

The company has to take their best information about customer value and translate it into specifications for the product and service they are going to provide. QFD is one formal way (though not the only way) to do this. Ultimately that becomes the product design. It is now up to production to actually deliver it at the target cost.

All well and good. Where this comes apart is (as always) at the seams.

Marketing and engineering “know best” and provide the “voice of the customer” when the customer actually isn’t even in the room.

The product may be specified, but the details aren’t worked through. There is only the most casual system to ensure that what is specified is actually what is built and delivered. Do you have a specified go/no-go outcome defined for each intermediate step in your process? Does that go beyond the product, and into the conditions required for success?

Delivery dates are given in terms of a range of time. In the USA the “cable guy” is famous for telling you he’ll be there between 9:00am and 4:00pm. We all laugh at how aggravating that is. But then think nothing of quoting “4-8 weeks” for a delivery window. WHEN is it supposed to be there?

Is your product support “leave it on the doorstep and run?” Do you follow-up with the customers and see what is, and is not, meeting their expectations? Do you solicit complaints (not simply collect them)?

All of these actions (or lack of them) will diminish your customer’s perception of value. Reputation and brand can carry past some transgressions, especially if there is really good follow-up. But even a 100 year old brand can be damaged, and the company is likely the last to know (not for want of clear signals).

The first step is “define value” but, to be clear, that means understanding what each and every step is doing to provide value to the next step in a long chain that both begins, and ends, with the customer.

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Reducing Inventory

Yesterday’s post on vendor managed inventory touched on a couple of things about “lean” and reducing inventory that I’d like to explore further.

All too often “inventory reduction” has been a way to “sell” a lean manufacturing implementation. The reduction of inventory becomes the objective. While this isn’t inherently a bad thing, it is all to easy to get caught up in the trap of “management by measurement” and do it the wrong way.

Reduced inventory is a result of good kaizen, but it isn’t the justification for doing it. The purpose of kaizen is to solve problems, specifically the problems that disrupt the smooth flow of work and creation of value. Solving those problems saves time – worker’s time, customer’s time, leader’s time because everything runs more smoothly and predictably.

The primary reason that inventory is there is because things aren’t smooth and predictable. Once they are, you can take some of it out.

The necessity to have inventory at any given point in the system is evidence of a problem that has not yet been solved. (Including, sometimes, simply having poor inventory management, which is another way of saying “overproduction.”)

By asking “What must we do to live without this piece of inventory?” you can uncover the next problem to solve, and then make a decision to solve it.

If it is solved, then inventory can be reduced. But it doesn’t happen automatically, you have to actually take it out of the system and keep it from coming back.

But in any case, this is a lot different than just shoving the ownership of the inventory onto someone else.

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The First Steps of The Lean Journey

“Where do I start?” seems to be one of the most commonly asked, and most intensely discussed and debated, topic on the various discussion forums over the years. Yet a clear consensus hasn’t really emerged.

Normally I don’t wade into those discussions when the question is asked generically. The reason is that without specifics about the situation, it is really hard to answer. There isn’t a clear set of step-by-step directions that say “Start here” followed by (2), (3) and so on.

Here’s how I look at it.

The theoretical end-game (which you likely never reach) is perfect one-piece-flow at takt time, with a perfectly safe work environment, producing 100% defect-free product, with no environmental impact, delivering it exactly when the customer needs it, without any wasted motion.

The practical end-game comes when the laws of physics and the limits of known technology become the limiting factors for further progress. (And even in that case, this is a usually a limit of human knowledge, which can be improved.)

The beginning is where ever you are.

There is no first step.
There is only the next step that moves you incrementally and tangibly toward perfection.

That next step is going to depend largely on what you are starting with.

The variation of starting points is what confounds the efforts to set down a formula. Any abstract attempt to answer the “Where do I start?” question must build in assumptions that answer the “Start from where?” question.

Here are a couple of examples.

If there is so much clutter and junk that people have to move things out of the way just to get work done, then absolutely, begin with the classic starting point – 5S. That can take anyone a long way as they learn to question why something is out of place, and come to realize that introducing new things into the workplace can will alter the way work is done. Best to do it on-purpose than randomly.

On the other hand, if the place is fairly neat, and most of the things are where they need to be, or close, and “looking for stuff” is not a huge impediment to the work, then I might be inclined to let workplace organization naturally evolve as part of the effort to establish some degree of stability.

If there is a hugely varying customer demand signal hitting the shop floor every day, calculating takt time is an exercise in frustration. If nobody believes it is possible to stabilize the demand, they aren’t much interested in hearing about takt. So the “first steps” might be to work on a leveling system so people have some solid ground to stand on.

It comes down to what is, right now, disrupting the effort to smooth out the work.

Maybe it’s quality and tons of rework. Then we’ve got to work on that. Or part shortages. Then at least contain the problem until a long-term solution can be put into place.

Sometimes it is leader’s knowledge. They don’t believe, or don’t understand, how improvement is possible. Countermeasure? Because “knowledge” is the next impediment to improvement, the “first step” becomes some kind of leader education, study mission, or other experience that is going to give them some confidence that they can do better (and it won’t be painful to get there).

If the organization has a lot of functional silos that are disrupting each other, it could be really beneficial to take a cross-functional team through a really deep exercise to understand how their system works and why it performs as it does. (this is a good time to use the current-state value stream map or a makagami.)

How do you know?
Ah – and that is why people ask the question in the first place.
As much as I hate to say it, I think the answer is “from experience.” This is one place where it might be worth your while to bring in someone who has done this a few times and get an opinion.

But if they tell you where to start without first personally assessing where you are, I’d question the quality of the answer. “There is no substitute for direct observation,” or, to use the Japanese jargon, genchi genbutsu. You can’t answer the question without first understanding the specific situation. At least I can’t, which is probably why I stay out of those debates.

I’d like to hear what you think. Feel free to leave comments.

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Looking at the wrong stuff: America’s Best Hospitals: The 2009-10 Honor Roll

This news piece, America’s Best Hospitals: The 2009-10 Honor Roll, originally got my attention because I hoped someone might be actually be paying attention to the things that make a real difference in our national debate about health care.

Unfortunately, it looks like more of the same.

This survey looks at things like technical capability – what kinds of specialty procedures these hospitals can perform, and their general reputation  and then ranks them accordingly.

But where are we asking about the basics?

Which hospitals kill or injure the fewest of their patients? What is the rate of post-operative or other opportunistic infection? How about medication errors? These are the things that all hospitals should be “getting right” and yet the evidence is overwhelming that most don’t. Further, nobody seems to be paying attention to it except tort lawyers.

Now take a look at this post on Steven Spear’s blog, and especially the Paul O’Neal commentary that he links to.

Tell me what makes a “good” hospital?

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Dennis Goethals, Learning and Leading at DesignOnStock Furniture

During my visit to The Netherlands, I had the pleasure to spend a couple of hours with Dennis Goethals, Managing Director and CEO of DesignOnStock, a furniture manufacturer in Tilburg, The Netherlands. What I saw and heard were all of the critical elements I have seen in organizations that pull this off in a spectacular fashion.

It starts, as always, with leadership. DesignOnStock, like every other success story I have experienced, has a leader who dedicated to his personal learning and understanding – at a level way beyond the common, but hollow, statements of “committed.” He is down on his shop floor, exploring the flow, looking for the next problem, and working the organization through a solution.

The results? He can deliver a custom order in 1/10 the time of his competitors. In these hard times, his business is increasing because he can offer quick turn-arounds to his customers who don’t want to keep a lot of inventory in anticipation of sales. They can sell one, order one, and have the replacement in a few days.

Rather than trying to recall the details myself, I asked Dennis to share his story as an interview.

How did you first get into the furniture manufacturing business, and what was your experience there?

Dennis: I studied Economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. My father had a small upholstery company. When he got sick, we agreed I would come and we would work together. My experience was that the furniture making industry is very traditional. No real partnership between companies. Very small companies in the whole industry. (the biggest in Holland is 350 people, on average 10-20 people per company). As I am an entrepreneur I thought this is the perfect industry to work in. High prices, some volume and not so much really strong competition. We worked like crazy and in 4 years time we grew from 5 to 25 people and from 300.000 usd to 6.000.000 usd. Sales was not our problem, we had great difficulty organizing our production. So much difficulty that at some stage I decided to sell the company and move the factory to Turkey.

Ed. Note: To fill in a gap in the timeline here, Dennis formed a partnership and opened another factory in Tilburg which was being set up traditionally when he then encountered “lean manufacturing.”

When did you first encounter “lean manufacturing?”
What was your initial reaction?

Dennis: Steven Blom introduced Lean manufacturing to me on 6th of December 2006 at 11.30 in the morning. I thought it was the most brilliant thing I had ever seen in my life! I realized I knew nothing about production, only what I had seen at other companies. And I was amazed not everybody is doing this.

What kind of problems did you have to overcome as you tried to implement flow?
How did you go about solving those problems?

Dennis: We had 2 big problems implementing flow:

First, when you implement flow it becomes very clear what everybody in the production line is doing. We had to replace some operators who didn’t like the idea of the ‘flow’ of their work to be visible. We ended up replacing almost 1/3 of the workforce because they didn’t want to leave the idea of batch production. This was very hard to do, letting people go is always difficult. But for us this was the only way.

And second, when you implement flow you have to make sure that the supply of parts is well organized, otherwise your line is down most of the time. We started to use kanban to order our parts to solve this. In ordering materials for your production line, kanban is the most brilliant thing I have ever seen.

What has this done for your business and your competitiveness up to this point?
How have you been effected by the global economic conditions?

Dennis: It has been an amazing experience. We reduced our lead time from 30 days to 3 days. We reduced inventory 60%. Our product quality has increased, our profit has tripled. We are the only company in the Netherlands who can ship a custom build sofa within the week! Due to the economic crisis a lot of our customers have cash flow issues. We are the only player in the market who can generate cash within 2 weeks. A lot of customers focus on selling designonstock.com products to improve their cash position. We increased turnover by 10% and due to further cost reductions we increased revenue by 60%.

Where do you think you are now on the “lean journey?”
What are your next steps?

Dennis: We have just begun our lean journey. The first thing we did was to implement one piece flow. This was the big breakthrough. Now we are fine tuning the tools you need to do one piece flow. I think we can double the output without increasing our workforce. We will do a lot of work ‘upstream.’ In his visit Mark explained this to me and this has brought a lot of new energy to us. We will try to further reduce inventory, simplify our system and we will have a very big focus on visualization and standardization in the months to come.

Do you have any advice for people who are wondering if this will work for them?

Dennis: I would use the Nike slogan: Just do it! When you first start to hear about lean, WCM (World Class Manufacturing), one piece flow, kanban etc. it all sounds a bit strange. Start with something really small. Like buy your groceries with a kanban system. That is how I learned it. This is a way of thinking, not a system you implement and then go back to business as usual. When you really get this, it will change all!

To conclude I would like to quote Lao Tze: Show me and I will look. Tell me and I will listen. Let me experience and I will learn.

—-

I would like to offer thanks, again, to Dennis for taking his valuable time both to show me around his plant, and to respond with his own words for the story of his experience. What I appreciate most, I think, is that he is not resting on his accomplishments. Rather, he sees what he has done so far only as a foundation.